EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

Not that long ago, the government in Canada started freezing citizen's bank accounts on suspicions they donated small amounts to a certain peaceful organization organizing protests the government didn't like. They just decided to suspend the constitution (because that's a thing over there?).

But what's interesting to see is people from Europe and Commonwealth nations voting with their feet and deciding that they too want more constitutional protections (which they are entitled to!). Here in the Bay it seems there's a constant interest from EU nationals to move to America (judging by the volume of applications we get). But I've never heard anyone interested to do the reverse.

Top destination for EU nationals in Academia was... right here in the US [0].

Interesting to speculate what impact the policies imposed by these non-elected EU bureaucrats will have on this demographic. More brain drain? Is it the intended goal?

[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...

I thought we were talking in the context of the EU? It's not a crime for them if the government is doing it (or asking for it). They don't have rights like that.

Couldn't someone still capture them from the untrusted hardware, wait until quantum computer technology is available, then decrypt them?

That's theoretical. I highly doubt anyone extends that much effort to target typewriters anymore. The best they could probably do is match a series of messages to the same typewriter. Though they might not even be able to do that, because the law-enforcement skills to match typewriter documents to each other have also probably nearly completely atrophied.

You're probably more likely to be caught by being the weirdo still buying typewriter ribbons.

I get the desire to control the entire chain, but nowadays you’re surrounded by cameras and microphones 24/7, every smart device is a surveillance sleeper agent waiting for the magic word. Certificate chains are the least of your worries.

Can you? If we're going this far, you can't trust the compiler either.

Fundamentally, all security is based on trusting somebody, understanding their incentives and intentions and weighing risk and reward. An excellent book on the subject is Bruce Schneier's "Liars and Outliers" https://www.schneier.com/books/liars-and-outliers/.

That led to the natural conclusion of legal words holding standardized definitions that might differ from common understanding, and extreme specification of all details in an effort to preemptively close off any and all loopholes.

Anyone who tries to make legalese simpler finds themselves immediately torn asunder by the aforementioned people looking for and abusing any and all loopholes as lawyers and those who learned the hard way look on shaking their heads.

Of course it is by design, not necessarily for evil purposes though.

First of all, the fact that laws are written in a "natural language" doesn't imply they can be fully understood by everyone, they are more like a math formula, it's only less obvious that laws need to be crafted in a way that requires an extensive knowledge of the subject. They're readable, but not always intelligible.

Natural languages are ambiguous, laws try to avoid it as much as they can, changing a word can often change the law intentions completely.

Secondly, exactly like scientific papers, if they have some kind of impact in the community, experts are gonna look at them, you can bet on it (also don't forget the army of lawyers companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, etc. have on their payroll).

And they will cover the entire spectrum from the most complacent to the biggest opponents and everything in between, so it's not actually like they will pass unnoticed. There's too much to gain in exposing your political opponents (and sometimes allies) to not take advantage from it. No professional politician would miss the opportunity.

It's no secret that many politicians have a training in law and the reason is obvious.

For example in the US of the 535 members who make up Congress, 40% had attended law school. For senators, nearly 54% have obtained a law degree. The House contains 37% law degree holders

> We should assume that they are trying to hide something

To assume this we should also assume that they - whoever they are, it's not clear to me - are all on board with the "evil plan" which is arguably very far from the facts we can prove.

In the game of assuming bad faith, we could equally assume that the opposition to this particular proposal is paid by the big tech corporations to avoid investing a lot of money to update their systems and losing the vendor lock in (WhatsApp messages are readable only by WhatsApp, Instagram messages only by Instagram, and so on...)

The vague wording and the complexity is here to give the legislator a lot of freedom in the interpretation of the text.

Bear in mind that those “technical” laws aren't written by MPs – they are written by lobbyists and private consultants like McKinsey, in cooperation with high-tier civil servants. Therefore, they usually follow an agenda that may be hidden or dishonest relative to their initial aim.

I'll take an example: you write a law relaxing the legal definition of what “chocolate” is. It happens that the MP in charge of this law has a Cadbury plant in its constituency – by pure chance, of course! The law and the debate will follow talking points about letting chocolate makers innovate and try new recipes. In reality, Cadbury et al. want to cut costs by introducing cheaper ingredients and reducing quality.

Once automatic screening is in place, it's effortless for the government to start repressing political dissent, to spy on the citizen's economic activity, and so on. In many EU countries, such as France, for instance, an authoritarian government would need to vote very few laws to completely shut down dissent : all the legislative weapons have already been voted by well-meaning and deluded MPs.

The European commission is as hypocritical as it can be. Von der Leyen refuses to show the private texts she exchanged with Pfizer' boss, but wants every EU citizen to surrender their private communications. What is next?

It's like calling code "programmerlese" and claim that programmers invented it so ordinary people don't understand software. The average adult reads with the comprehension of an 8th grader, if deception was the goal they'd hardly need to try that hard.

EU documents are complicated because more than two-dozen national governments and thousands of people work on these texts because they can't ever agree on anything without throwing in 500 exceptions for each country, it's that simple, there's no tinfoil conspiracy.

And to be even more honest, technical people have a very hard time getting their point across non-technical people and engaging in politics

You can often determine the source, the destination, the amount of data over time, etc. but those are hardly sufficient to suspect wrongdoing unless there's also other overwhelming evidence already.

Also, assuming message 1 and 2 contents are identical, if anyone steals the governments' private key the encryption of message 1 is moot.

But "ads" is pretty euphemistic -- to the point of dishonesty -- when the ads are targeted political campaign messages, for example.

Cambridge Analytica was at least enabled by Facebook.

I'd say that their operations could be summed up more reasonably by "Facebook track people".

You can have E2E encryption, as that term is understood, and scan the communications, you just have to do so locally on the end devices. The example the bureaucrat gave of scanning for a URL and inserting a thumbnail is actually quite relevant and technologically similar, even if the ramifications/scale/difficulty are very different.

Whether this type of forced scanning is desirable or not is another question. We can have the debate, but if you are going to say “wow this politician is so dumb, she doesn’t understand anything technical”, then your takedown better be pedantically correct.

Also, I was really confused about the critique that (I think?) is saying the politician is dumb for thinking that some nude pictures of children are legal. But in fact this IS true, not all pictures of nude children are pornography or illegal (in the US at least). And I don’t mean that in some weaselly, CP apologist way. One famous example is the “napalm girl” photo from the Vietnam war (a Pulitzer Prize winner in fact), another more recent one are the photos those parents sent to their child’s doctor at the doctor’s behest. Or am I misunderstanding the critique here?

The informed ones anyway. They would be happy to get the uninformed ones as it still makes their numbers look better and justifies their position of weakening the internet.

Those interested in the legal system out there should also be familiar with the idea of how some criminals will get away in the attempt to prevent any innocent person from going to prison.

Sometimes it costs more to fight a problem than you get back from solving it.

Maybe a bit of Argument from incredulity and appeal to emotion? "i can't see any other solution, so this is the only way."

Never mind that the large majority of child abuse is done by government. Either directly, as in the perpetrator is a government employee or by failure to actually pay attention to children entrusted to them. The top child abusers are schools "and school related" (50% or so staff, 50% failure to prevent children abusing each other).

https://www.unicef.org/protection/violence-against-children-...

"Far from a haven for learning and community, school can be a place of bullying, sexual harassment, corporal punishment, verbal abuse and other forms of violence."

Even the very worst of child professional projections say that violence and abuse at home affects ~10% of children. Which is bad. How much children are affected by violence under the supervision of the state according to this report? 50%.

And the worst of that figure: it's obviously true. Is there anyone here that has not at least seen violence in school, but more likely experienced it firsthand?

Note that although the report focuses on third world countries in the press release, there is no such result in the actual report. "First world" schools are much less likely to be attacked by government or external forces directly, but most other violence and abuse problems are actually worse than in the third world.

Within the group, the more people believe that it's the norm, the less social impetus there is to address individual bad actors.

Outside that group, people are less likely to treat people fairly if they are perceived to be part of a group of bad actors. How is someone making a positive difference supposed to navigate an environment where everyone assumes they are bad actors?

Finally, pointing to a single case of someone who was arrested for corruption among literal thousands of bureaucrats does not make a compelling case.

That takes a special kind of stupid.